Local startups get into global shape at Google’s bootcamp

Akanksha Hazari, CEO of mPaani, said: “All this training and information is going to help us provide a much richer recommendation experience for our customers and retailers.”

SAN FRANCISCO: When Bangladeshi digital platform for health advice Maya Apa started up about three years ago, most of the messages were spam. The online messaging platform was meant for women to get help in the anonymity of the Internet, but it turned into a field for rampant spamming.

Over many months of teaching the machine to weed out spam, the startup now can automatically refer queries to the right experts – a machine-learning patch to sift through pre-fed keywords separates the questions broadly between medical, psycho-social, legal, and other brackets to route to doctors. It faces another frontier now. Running on an accuracy of 60%, the machine stumbles over different dialects of the Bangla language.

“Often, because of the way certain words are pronounced, the auto-referral programme fumbles,” said Ivy Russell, CEO of Maya, one of the 23 startups from emerging economies that have joined Google’s Launchpad Accelerator.

Besides Maya, Pakistan’s VividTech, which turns a customer care call into visual on smartphones to navigate the IVR labyrinth, and startups from South-East Asia were included in the two-week boot camp programme run by the search giant earlier this month. African etailers and payment companies, and Brazilian unicorns fresh out of mergers also got to be a part.

For the Indian contingent, the key criterion for selection was applicability of machine learning and artificial intelligence. “For the last two Launchpads, we have been focusing on two aspects: Solve for India and solve using machine learning and Artificial Intelligence," Paul Ravindranath G, head of LaunchPad for India, said.

Be it Niramai, a breast cancer screening startup using artificial intelligence on heat images to detect malignancy; BabyChakra, which banks on machine learning workloads to contextualise queries on its platform for parenting; SocialCops working on Big Data analytics; and loyalty and marketing platform mPaani – the common thread is their need to make their digital platforms intelligent.

Akanksha Hazari, CEO of mPaani, said: “All this training and information is going to help us provide a much richer recommendation experience for our customers and retailers.”

Roy Glasberg, who founded and runs the LaunchPad for Google, said, “Our aim is to democratise machine learning and AI. Today, there are no access challenges – one can build (products) on cloud from wherever.”

What goes on at the startup accelerator is closely linked to pursuits inside Google’s research labs. For example, Research at Google has published papers on translators that can reduce errors by 60% compared to the current phrasebased system, something startups like Maya Apa can benefit from for its target markets.

(The reporter was in San Francisco, US, at the invitation of Google)

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